Naguib Mahfouz; Telegraph obit
Hyfler/Rosner
Naguib Mahfouz
(Filed: 31/08/2006) Telegraph
Naguib Mahfouz, who died yesterday aged 94, was the
first Arabic language writer to win the Nobel Prize for
Literature, and is credited with transforming written Arabic
into a vehicle for popular literature.
Best known for the three books which comprise his
Cairo Trilogy, published in the 1950s, Mahfouz became
enormously popular all over the Arab world; but it was only
after winning the Nobel Prize in 1988 that he became famous
in the West. Late in life he aroused the wrath of Islamic
militants, and was fortunate to survive an assassination
attempt in 1994.
Naguib Mahfouz was born on December 11 1911, the
youngest of seven children of a minor civil servant, and
grew up in the Gamaliyya quarter of Old Cairo. His childhood
was coloured by the period of intense nationalist activity
that led to the 1919 revolution, and he witnessed British
troops firing on independence demonstrators outside his own
home.
In 1930 he enrolled as a philosophy student at the
newly-established University of Cairo, and soon afterwards
published his first article, which focused on the inevitable
triumph of Socialism. He continued to publish theoretical
articles and, since all lectures were conducted in English
and French, set about improving his knowledge of these
languages with his customary self-discipline.
He soon completed an Arabic translation of James
Baikies's Ancient Egypt, which was published in 1932; and,
by the time he graduated, he could read Zola and Balzac in
the original - though he particularly enjoyed Tolstoy, which
he read in French. He never managed to finish a novel by
Dickens.
After graduating he decided both to enter the
comfortable world of the civil service and to become a
writer. He had soon completed 80 short stories, most of them
in the cynical but witty style of Guy de Maupassant, and his
first collection, A Whisper of Madness, was published in
1938. The next year he went to work for the Ministry of
Religious Affairs, where he remained for the next 15 years.
After three unsuccessful attempts his first novel,
Games of Fate, was published in 1939. Heavily influenced by
Walter Scott, it was a historical, romantic novel set in
Ancient Egypt and featured an oppressive monarchy and the
expulsion of foreign invaders. He had originally planned to
write a series of similar novels, but the Second World War
broke out and his outlook changed.
New Cairo (1946) was the first of five novels set in
contemporary Cairo. Written in a social-realist style most
reminiscent of Balzac, this story of corruption at the
University was soon followed by Khan al-Khalili (1945) and
Midaq Alley (1947), a vivid evocation of the way in which
the Second World War affected the inhabitants of the
neighbourhood where Mahfouz was born.
The characters, who included a beautiful prostitute, a
dope-addicted paedophile and a "cripple-maker", were both
fascinating and shocking for Egyptian readers - the mere
thought of writing about such subjects had hitherto been
taboo, and yet Mahfouz handled them with a candour unknown
in Arabic literature.
The Mirage (1949) and The Beginning and the End (1951)
were characterised by a strong sense of family, concern for
the underprivileged and more social realism. By this time
Mahfouz was also working with a film director called Abou
Seif on a series of hugely popular and highly successful
screenplays that captured the flavour of contemporary
Egyptian life.
In 1947 he began his most ambitious work, the Cairo
Trilogy, which he described as "a history of my country and
myself". It was the eventual French translation of volume
one in 1988 which is generally thought to have brought him
the Nobel Prize, since none of the committee members could
read Arabic.
Palace Walk (1956) introduces the petty bourgeois
family that he follows through three generations, from 1917
to 1944. It concentrates on the patriarch whose power fades
away along with his traditional society. Palace of Desire
(1957) focuses on his oldest son, whose dissolute lifestyle
matches the corruption and failure of the nationalist
movement; while Kamal, the youngest son, who is a
self-portrait of the author, undergoes a similar crisis of
faith. Sugar Street (1957) tells the story of the
patriarch's grandchildren and shows a renewed hope in the
modern world.
The 1,500-page trilogy has become the best known piece
of fiction in Arabic, and its use of the vernacular, its
psychological detail and its sheer social scope were
revolutionary. Such a book had never been seen in Arabic
before and it was a huge and immediate success. By 1985 it
had been reprinted 13 times, while a pirate Lebanese version
had sold more than a million copies; Palace of Desire had
won him the State Prize for Literature.
After the 1952 revolution (which ended the monarchy
and put Nasser into power) Mahfouz felt that the world he
had chosen to chronicle had begun to disappear. For a time
he worked on a number of screenplays. He also married, had
two daughters and finally transferred to a post in the
Ministry of Arts. By 1959, when he eventually resumed
fiction writing, his style had changed again.
Children of Gebelawi (1959, translated 1981) is an
iconoclastic allegory containing 114 chapters (the same
number as the Koran) which concludes with a vision of man
searching in a rubbish dump for clues about his salvation.
It was serialised in Al-Ahram, Egypt's biggest-circulation
national newspaper, but was at once condemned as blasphemous
and was not published in Egypt. Late last year a monthly
magazine tried to publish the novel, but Mahfouz said that
he would not agree without the consent of Al-Azhar
university, Sunni Islam's oldest seat of learning.
From 1960 onwards more than 30 of Mahfouz's novels and
short stories were adapted for the screen, starting with The
Beginning and the End, which won the National Film Prize in
1962, and his work began to be revered by cinema-going
Egyptians who had never read his books.
Between 1961 and 1967 he published six novel and
short-story collections, all experimental and often
anguished, reflecting his growing interest in European
modernism and the works of Jean-Paul Sartre. The Thief and
the Dogs (1961) concerned a victim driven mad by the desire
for revenge, while Autumn Quail (1961) tackled the Nasser
government's failure to rehabilitate the intellectuals of
the old regime.
Egypt's humiliation in the Six-Day War threw him into
a new spiritual crisis which reached a peak with Miramar
(1967), a bleak tale in which the lone figure of hope in a
corrupt world is a peasant girl living in squalor in
Alexandria. For several years after this he wrote only short
stories and Absurd plays in which nameless characters pursue
undefined quests with tragic results.
After his retirement from the civil service in 1972 he
completed the best received of his later novels, Wedding
Song (1987), the story of the supposed suicide of a
playwright after rumours that he has murdered his wife and
child.
During the late 1970s Mahfouz's work was attacked
because of his support for the 1979 Israel-Egypt peace
treaty. But the public continued to read his books, and his
receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1988 was universally welcomed.
He himself received the news with typical understatement: "I
was not even aware that I had been nominated. I thought the
world had forgotten us."
After the award ceremony, his rather retiring life
briefly became a whirlwind of chat-shows and public
appearances but, though he was now a national symbol, none
of this dented his modesty. Typically, he gave more than
half the £250,000 prize money to his family and a large
proportion of the remainder to a Palestinian charity.
In December 1988 Children of Gebelawi was once again
serialised in Al-Ahram, and publication set off a renewed
barrage of abuse as well as a death sentence from one of
Egypt's leading imams. Although Mahfouz was recognised
everywhere (his portrait now adorned Egypt's postage
stamps), he refused offers of government protection.
His acceptance of the Nobel prize from the "godless"
West, his condemnation of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and
his defence of Salman Rushdie all exacerbated his situation
and, in October 1994, he was the victim of a street attack
near his home, during which he was stabbed twice in the
neck. His writing hand was paralysed. Two Islamic militants
were later hanged for attempted murder.
By this time Mahfouz's obscurity in the West had
lifted, and the rights to the Cairo Trilogy were finally
sold in the United States, having been on the market there
for 20 years.
Renowned for his simplicity as well as his
self-discipline, even after he found fame Mahfouz continued
to live in a modest Cairo flat with his wife, Attiyat-Allah,
and his two daughters. He suffered from chronic health
problems, but he still lived up to his nick-name "Omega", a
reference to the unvarying tick-tock of his schedule.
Every morning he rose at 6am, went for a 60-minute
walk through Cairo to the Ali Baba café, read through the
morning's newspapers and then returned home to write for two
hours. Every afternoon except Thursday he received visitors
from all over the world at his office at Al-Ahram, for which
he wrote a column.
Apart from two government-sponsored visits to Yemen
and Yugoslavia and a trip to London in 1991 for an
operation, he never set foot outside Egypt. On his
eighty-fifth birthday, in December 1996, the American
University in Cairo inaugurated a literary prize in his
name, while the Cairo Film Festival gave out a Naguib
Mahfouz award. He also published a collection of aphorisms,
parables and musings entitled Echoes of an Autobiography.
Last year he published The Seventh Heaven, a
collection of stories about the afterlife.